Whirty: A friend gets on board with Buck Leonard

From SABR member Ryan Whirty at Home Plate Don't Move on March 1, 2018:

For this post/installment of my Buck Leonard series (a couple earlier installments here and here), I wanted to highlight how the subject of the Negro Leagues and their history is so infectious that enthusiasm for it spreads from person to person effortlessly, including on a especially personal level.

The following essay is written by my dear friend Calvin Adkins, whom I met in 1995, right after I graduated from IU and moved to eastern North Carolina. Calvin and I worked together for a couple years in Tarboro, N.C., where, as it happens, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bill Foster lived for a couple decades after retirement.

When Foster was elected to the Hall in 1996, Calvin and I worked on a story about Foster’s connection to Tarboro for the Daily Southerner newspaper [which has, sadly, subsequently closed after nearly two centuries of publication]. As part of our reporting, we ventured to Rocky Mount to interview Buck Leonard about Foster and a host of other topics.

Below is a narrative penned by Calvin about that incredible day in which I passed on my love of the Negro Leagues to someone who has since become a lifelong, close friend.